Saturday, December 5, 2015

A VC On the Opportunity In Lists

From A VC:

For as long as the web has been around, there have been entrepreneurs
trying to build businesses around lists. And I’m having a tough time
thinking of any company that has really nailed it in this category.

For one thing, there are two modes of listmaking; making lists for
yourself (task management) and making lists for others (publishing). It
would seem that by focusing on the single user case (making lists for
yourself) a startup could bootstrap itself into a network (making lists
for others). But to my knowledge, no startup has successfully done that.
I wonder if nailing the single user case forces a company to build
features that are orthogonal to the publishing use case.

It is certainly true that there have been some decent exits in this category. This past summer, Wunderlist
was bought by Microsoft. Wunderlist is a great product, but to my mind
focused more on the single user case and it never really broke out into a
network.

Listmaking is the kind of thing that really lends itself to the
internet architecture. There are a relatively small number of people who
are obsessed with listmaking. But most people are into consuming lists.
So, it would seem that, if you can get the obsessed listmakers on your
platform, you can build a publishing network that millions will use
without having to create any of the content. That’s a recipe for
success....MORE